They Whom The Gods Love
by PinkFreud
Summary: Death loved him the most. Sad oneshot about Boone's death in season 1.


Title: They Whom The Gods Love

Rating: K+

Author: PinkFreud

Summary: Death loved him the most. Oneshot about Boone's death in season 1.

Disclaimer: I don't own 'Lost', it's characters, plot, whatever...I also don't own any of the poetry quotes in italics.

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_'What I really want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death?'--**e.e. cummings**_

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_They whom the gods love die young._

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Death had been watching the beautiful young man for nearly three days. Or, at least watching him more intently. He had caught Her eye in passing many times before, once or twice before the plane even fell from the sky, but now he was more fully in Her vision, and She didn't intend to let him stray too far.

Oh, he tried so hard, so hard to do the right thing always, he was so good to everyone around him, even when they lied, when they betrayed him, when they used him, when they treated him like dirt while smiling at him. And he felt guilt at times for things he had not even done, yet deemed himself responsible for, somehow. And he loved always too easily, and felt his heart broken, repaired, and then broken again while still in a fragile state.

He trusted too easily as well, he should have been more wise, but he wanted to believe that someone had taken an interest in him, actually wanted to spend time with him, talking to him and teaching him things. And he did learn a thing or two; frightening hallucinations exposed sublimated darknesses in his psyche, showing him parts of his own soul that he wished to keep hidden. And he learned just how much physical pain his body could endure before losing consciousness; he learned just how loudly and how horribly he could scream in agony.

And Death saw all this, and took it into account, but whether it mattered or not was impossible to tell. Someone else was screaming, out in the jungle; a woman giving birth. Balance in Nature is crucial, and somehow, the young man knew that with the gift of new life, life must also be taken. He could barely see. A line from a poem by Emily Dickinson swam through his mind, _'and then the windows failed and I--I could not see to see'_. Good old Emily. The young man had always thought of the reclusive poet as Death's good friend.

There was a fly somewhere; he could practically hear its little wings humming crazily. The jungle was full of insects, the humid air drew them out, and at night sometimes there were whole clouds of them, bunched together. And then, they would fly up and up and blend into the sky around them, and he would be unsure if they were ever really there at all.

And maybe there was no fly here, now. Maybe this was just what dying sounded like, like an insect.

_'I heard a fly buzz when I died, the stillness round the room--was like the stillness in the air between the heaves of Storm'_. Ah, good old Emily again. She had never failed him. He used to sit in his room sometimes when he was younger, and read her poems. She wasn't as starkly morbid about death as Sylvia Plath, for example, who he always thought of as Death's lover, rather than friend. Sylvia loved Death with reckless, fiery, passionate abandon; Emily invited Death over for tea.

_'Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.'_ But the young man did not supposed that Death was male, or any gender at all, really, though the cold, unseen hand that he felt caressing his skin felt remarkably feminine, and it was touching him so much more gently and reverently than any living woman's hand ever had.

And now, as if he was out again on the beach, watching the clouds of buzzing insects blend into the night sky, he felt himself falling upward, strangely, as if the earth had tipped over entirely, and he was falling into the night, into blackness laced with stars. And there was that humming again, but it was a warm, fuzzy hum, and he was slowly dissolving and becoming a part of it. His last thought was that he was being kissed by that same entity that had been touching him before. Being kissed very intimately and lovingly. '_You were right, Emily,_' he thought to himself, _'It's really not that bad._' Maybe he would see her soon, too.

The sky was so beautiful. Death smiled facelessly. Her work was done, he was hers now. Much, much too pretty to be alive, anyhow.


End file.
